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Who left the garage door open?

We have a full house with a lot of activity and visitors. There have been several times when the garage door is left open for extended periods of time. While our Christmas decorations and paint supplies may not be a treasure most would be thieves would desire, it is still not the most comforting thing to think about leaving the garage open for all passerby to see. I often thought it would be great to have a way to notify whoever is in the house that the garage is open.

Phase 1 – LED Indicator

I decided that my first step would be to design a way to detect “door open” by providing a simple indicator light. I explored a few optical ways to do this (light beam, camera, reflectors) but quickly pivoted my approach when I found some unused microswitches.

I found a good place to detect “closed” on the main track. I thought about piggybacking on the garage opener sensors but dismissed that as I didn’t want to risk an undesirable interaction with the opener and more importantly, I wanted to have the detection work even if power to the opener was interrupted.

This required that I build a bracket to mount the switch to and a ramp plate to compress the switch when the door was in the down position.

I used an aluminum sheet, cut with sheet metal snips, bent and drilled holes to mount the microswitch and eventually attach it to the garage door track. It took a few tries to get the right fit and right placement of the micro switch.

My first attempt destroyed the microswitch after a few uses. The garage door track sled has a straight edge that collides with the microswitch roller. It created too much force on the small roller and eventually popped it loose. To help with that, I added an aluminum ramp to the sled so that the microswitch roller would gently rise as the sled entered the “closed” position.

I decided to make the “door open” state be the closed circuit condition so that phase 1 of the project could start as a simple LED circuit indicator.

I attached the switch and drilled some pilot holes and mounted the bracket to the garage door track right above the sled when the door is in the closed position.

I added a 9V battery, a 470 ohm resister and a red LED to the circuit. To complete this phase, I ran the wire from the garage to our entry hall and mounted an LED and housing above the HVAC controls. Now we can all see the brilliant red LED glowing when the garage door is open. That covers some of our use cases but I also want a more proactive notification. Now on to phase 2…

Phase 2 – Raspberry Pi – Home Automation Sentry

Now that I have a working “door closed” sensor and indicator, I am ready to add the proactive home automation component, specifically the Raspberry Pi (RPI). It just so happens that I have a spare RPI Model 3 that needed a project, and I wanted to experiment with AWS IoT services.

I used the RPI to detect the state of the switch. To do that, I will need to wire the circuit into the RPI’sGPIO headers. I decided to use GPIO Pin 23 and the adjacent ground (GND) pin.

Here is the code that is used to detect the closed circuit (indicating an open door):

Sentry Alert – Send a text message to contacts when an alert condition is reached.

Dashboard – Provide an automation dashboard for realtime status.

Other Sensor Data:

Temperature Sensors

Barometric Pressure Sensor

Humidity Sensor

Motion Sensor

To set up a web based dashboard, I decide to use static HTML, CSS and JS (jQuery, Chart.js and the AWS JavaScript SDK) so it can be hosted on a simple S3 bucket, a web server, or the RPi itself. See here for the code.

#DOES17

I had the privilege of attending and speaking again at this years DevOps Enterprise Summit in London at Queen Elizabeth II Centre across the street from Westminster Abby and Big Ben. The conference was attended by nearly 700 transformative leaders from companies and organization across the UK and the rest of Europe: Hiscox, ITV, Barclays, Hearst, Jaguar Land Rover, Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Northrop Grumman, easyJet, Capital One, UK Ministry of Justice, ING, Swisscom, Lockheed Martin and more.

This should be required reading for all technology and business leaders who are serious about digital transformation. This book takes you on a provocative, fun and comprehensive tour of the key areas that will promote and ignite digital empowering agility, creativity, learning, community and collaboration.

This book may be about taking a seat, but this is no time to be sitting still! IT leaders will be convinced that their job is now about incentivizing and inspiring courage, passion and technical excellence in service of business objectives rather than blindly servicing requirements. You will even find practical advice on how to deal with projects, scope creep, IT assets (what the author calls Enterprise Architecture), governance, security, risk management, quality, and shadow IT.

The 2016 edition of the San Francisco based DevOps Enterprise Summit underscored the momentum and scale of the DevOps movement across the industry. The summit saw record level attendance and phenomenal presentations from established DevOps luminaries, notable DevOps transformational companies as well as many new companies.

“We are at our best when we are helping each other, serving each other, and making a positive difference” – Jason Cox, Disney

Transformational technology leaders from many companies across the world assembled at the 2016 DevOps Enterprise Forum to discuss DevOps practices, challenges and best-known methods to help our organizations and our community succeed.

Along with several other leaders, I had the privilege of helping put together a guidance document on DevOps Organizational Models to accelerate business and empower workers. In this free publication by IT Revolution, we take a look at how and why organizations are structured, examine which have characteristics that promote or impede business enabling DevOps practices, and take a deep dive into four different models that began to surface during our research: (1) the traditional functional silo hierarchy, (2) the matrix model, (3) the product platform model and the (X) adaptive organization model.

I once again had the privilege of attending the DevOps Enterprise Summit. This time it was in the U.K. at the Hilton Metropole. I was impressed with the representation and talks from companies and organization across the UK and the rest of Europe: SAP, ITV, Hiscox, ING, Barclays, HMRC, Zurich, and many more.

As an leader who loves working with people, I often have the pleasure of hearing from individuals at all levels across the organization. However, I am often amazed at how many people fail to communicate effectively with their leaders and others. They are terrible at scheduling meetings, pitching their idea or even asking for help. That got me to thinking, what advice would I give to anyone who needs to communicate with me or other leaders? I came up a list of 7 imperatives that I have learned from those who are the most successful.

1) Be contextual – I often have meeting invites or receive emails or presentations that provide little or no context. The senders may have mentioned it in a prior exchange and are usually saturated in the subject themselves, but most leaders are constantly task switching and juggling multiple ideas, projects, discussions, etc., and can struggle to make connections back to the senders requests. While we all want to be superhuman and always “know what you are talking bout”, the truth is that we have a finite capacity to retain more than a handful of contexts. Provide “helps” to onboard the leader and the rest of the audience quickly. That will help you succeed in getting the point across and if needed, a decision. I love seeing context in the meeting invite or email, or in the case of ad hoc meetings, and introductory summary for why he or she should listen to you.

2) Be brief – As with most leaders, I get several hundred emails, calls, texts and IMs per day. I must skim to survive. You should fashion your communications so that important ideas are highlighted. For written communication, make use of white space to help the eye quickly skim and do what you can to avoid unnecessary language. Can I suggest that executives aren’t the only ones who appreciate this and anyone who discovers this art of concise and effective communication will succeed in their career?

3) Be real – Leaders see through bogus accomplishments and self promotion. I’m most impressed with people who are respectful but direct, confident but humble, and candid but optimistic. They spend more time acknowledging others and the achievements of their team rather than their own.

4) Be kind – Good leaders have little tolerance for other leaders or managers who berate, belittle, or otherwise deal harshly with their team or others. Don’t expect to find a gracious audience with your own leader if you can’t deal respectfully, courteously and graciously with your own staff and partners. Treat others as you want to be treated.

5) Be honest – I’ve seen individuals and teams manipulate messages and presentations to get an executive decision or modify perception without providing all the details or slightly modifying the story. If you know something that could materially impact the decision process, why are you hiding it? Blocking signals to manipulate circumstances for your own benefit will backfire on you personally and in some cases have a significant impact on the company, brand, employees or customers. Be honest.

6) Be optimistic – Good leaders are not looking for everyone to be Pollyanna and will prefer a difficult truth to a comforting lie, but rarely are things without hope or some positive element. Bring a bias toward positive solutions, look for the opportunity in the disappointment, the lesson in a setback or wisdom in a failure. Business is about taking risks and moving forward from mistakes. Surround yourself with others who believe we can make a difference and impact the world for the better. Be an optimist.

7) Be proactive – Don’t just tell your leader what someone else needs to do, take action yourself. It’s great to have a plan to make something better and to bring that to the attention of your leader, but be prepared to be part of the solution! Leaders are always on the lookout for a great idea with muscle. What are you doing to turn your great idea into reality? Get started.

This list is in no way comprehensive, but hopefully it will help you as it has helped me.

Business value, the north star of Agile, Lean and DevOps champions, is often more difficult to determine than one would imagine. This book takes the reader on a journey to discover that value while along the way, creating helpful mental models, challenging preconceived notions and proposing some creative ways to transform an organization.

The author does a great treatment of ROI (Return on Investment – does anyone ever really measure that?), NPV (Net Present Value), MVA (Market Value Added) and SVA (Shareholder Value Added). I especially enjoyed the humorous practical example that revealed a surprising truth that acquiring an MBA can easily have a negative NPV (in other words, a bad investment!) So save your money and pay attention to the author’s “four-paragraph MBA” (p. 20) that unpacks the main two principles learned in an MBA: 1) There is time value of money and 2) A business venture needs a sustainable competitive advantage.

Legacy IT architecture and bureaucracy are often considered negatives and obstacles to progressive competitive relevance but the author brings a refreshing perspective on the “value” of that complex hairball of legacy and rules and the right way to polish and transform them.

On Agile…

“The purpose of an Agile team is to self-organize and meet the underlying business need in the best way possible, often by cutting through the bureaucracy.” (p 55)

On DevOps…

“The DevOps model…looks to break down the silos that have resulted from technical specialization over the last few decades. But the DevOps spirit goes further looking to eliminate the conflicting incentives of organizational silos and the inhumane behaviors that can result from those conflicting incentives.” (p 48)

On Bureaucracy…

“Bureaucracy delivers business value. Just sometimes not enough.” (p 59)
…”developers are bureaucrats by nature. We have a tendency to solve problems by creating standard processes rather than by relying on human judgment.” (p 54)
“The pipeline is an automated bureaucracy: it applies its rules in a rigorous, unemotional way, sine ira et studio. That does not mean that the software development process is unemotional; it means that the tools are unemotional and the passion is brought to the process by the people.” (p 105)

And on Business Value…

“Business value is a hypothesis held by the organization’s leadership as to what will best accomplish the organization’s ultimate goals or desired outcomes.” (p 90)

I highly recommend this book to IT leaders, digital executives, strategic managers, and anyone seeking to make their organization more agile, effective, relevant, competitive and humane.

I wanted to see if I could get a Docker + Mesos + Marathon platform up and running quickly in AWS EC2 using t2.micro instances. I found this great article by Gar (@gargar454) where he has put all the components in docker containers and provides a simple tutorial which I paste below with some minor edits:

Create your EC2 instances (Amazon AMI t2.micro will work), set it up in your private VPC and auto-assign a public IP so you can test. You will need to open TCP ports 5050 and 8080 in your security group from your workstation if you want to see the Mesos and Marathon UIs. Run these commands to set up a docker host: